“Paint It, Black” : The Anger Part of Grief

Every so often I’ll hear a song somewhere and wonder why I didn’t include it on my playlist for Holding Breath: A Memoir of AIDS’ Wildfire Days.  The Stones’ “Paint It, Black” is one of those songs.

In many reviews of the book, people write about the sadness of the story; quite a few say that it made them cry.  And of course David’s passing filled me with a sorrow for which it seemed there would never be any remedy–a sorrow that came back to me, full-force, sixteen years later when I started once again to try to write his book.

But the book also describes my anger–anger at the loss, anger that people’s lives seemed to go on as if nothing had happened when I lost David, anger at AIDS and the attitudes about it, anger that a man I’d been seeing around the time I met David had the nerve to want to spend time with me again, and even, sometimes, an irrational anger at David himself.  And the anger returned all those years later, when my bout of “disenfranchised grief” began.

This is an excerpt from the book in which I describe the anger I felt shortly after David’s death:

“I wrote something in my blog about trying to get back to my old life: …returning for the first time after David’s death to one of the bars I used to spend a lot of time in before I met him, sitting alone on a barstool under the blue lights in the early evening as the band was setting up, feeling, for the first time, anger instead of grief, or as a different manifestation of grief. Old friends tried to talk to me, but I could barely speak; they had become intrusions, and I hated them for it. I hated the lights, I hated the music, and I hated anyone or anything who wasn’t David, or a means of bringing him back, and I went home early.”

“Paint It, Black” is such an obvious “soundtrack” to those feelings that I’m really surprised that I never thought to include it in my playlist.  Consider it included now. (Generally when I provide links to YouTube versions of songs I try to use the ones not preceded by ads, but this is a wonderful version of the song–a live version by a group of little boys who call themselves the Rolling Stones.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6d8eKvegLI

Holding Breath: A Memoir of AIDS’ Wildfire Days is available on Amazon.com here:

http://www.amazon.com/Holding-Breath-Memoir-Wildfire-ebook/dp/B009TV4CE6/ref=sr_1_3?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1350864778&sr=1-3&keywords=Bevilaqua

Holding Breath: A Memoir of AIDS’ Wildfire Days On Sale This Week

The price of the Kindle version of my book, Holding Breath: A Memoir of AIDS’ Wildfire Days (you know–the book that this blog is about!), will be reduced just this week to 99 cents.  On May 1st it will go back to its usual price of $3.99.  (The print version is also available for $11.95.)  Here’s the link:

http://www.amazon.com/Holding-Breath-Memoir-Wildfire-ebook/dp/B009TV4CE6/ref=sr_1_3?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1350864778&sr=1-3&keywords=Bevilaqua

Depressed at Disney

A few minutes ago I happened to look at my travel blog (between 2001 and about 2009 I was a relatively successful freelance travel writer; the blog is for the most part made up of travel narratives I’d written that weren’t quite commercially-oriented enough for most travel publications, but are still my favorites), and at a story I wrote back in 2006.

The story, which is called “Depressed at Disney World”, is about a press trip I took to Orlando just when my newly awakened grief for David had started to surface, and I was on the brink of a kind of emotional free-fall.  In the story, I simply refer to David as “my friend.”

It occurred to me that this might be a good place to share it.  Here’s the link:

http://zeroandback.blogspot.com/2008/01/depressed-at-disney-world.html

Excerpt from Holding Breath in A & U Magazine

A & U (Arts and Understanding) Magazine ran an excerpt from my book, Holding Breath: A Memoir of AIDS’ Wildfire Days, in this month’s issue.  I was, of course, thrilled.  A & U is a magazine that was launched in 1991, and its mission is to “collect, archive, publish and distribute the growing body of art, activism, and current events emanating from the AIDS pandemic.”

The excerpt they published was actually included in a post in this blog a while back, but I’m happy to share it again through a link to the magazine’s website:

http://aumag.org/wordpress/?p=6309

(To see the digital edition of the magazine, go to:

http://aumag.org/wordpress/?page_id=5920)

Mambo Sun, 14th and A, Fall of 1989

It’s about 4 p.m. on a warm fall afternoon in Manhattan, in 1989.  I’ve just visited my last client of the day at his apartment in Stuyvesant Town, the apartment complex across 20th Street from Peter Cooper Village, where I’d lived as a child.  I’m free for the rest of the afternoon, and all night, and I have no plans to go home to my own apartment in Hoboken, because I’m falling in love with David, and I don’t want to be anywhere other than his studio apartment on Suffolk Street, where I’ve recently started spending most of my nights, against anyone’s better judgement but my own.

So instead of walking up 14th Street to First Avenue to catch a bus across town, I cross the street and start south on Avenue A, toward David’s place.  The afternoon light is orange and gold on the sidewalks and windows and storefronts, and I smell the East river, and pizza and Dominican food and bus exhaust and cigarette smoke. I have my Walkman on as I head downtown through the East Village, and I’m scared to death of what I’ve been doing with David and at the same time incredibly happy because I will be spending another night with him.

And my Walkman is playing the album Electric Warrior, by T. Rex. Whenever I hear the song “Mambo Sun,” that afternoon, and that intersection, and the way everything looked and smelled and felt, and the fear and joy of realizing that I was falling in love with a man who had AIDS and who was also my client, and that no one would ever be able to understand why I would take such a risk, all come back to me.  It’s a memory I never want to lose.

Here’s the song:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzW1TBLqKFY

Film Trivia

Most of the interior shots for the indie film Pieces of April (which stars Katie Holmes, who is just so pretty, and also quite a good actress) were filmed in David’s old building on Suffolk Street several years after the period during which Holding Breath takes place.  (The filmmakers managed to find an even seedier-looking building for the exterior shots, although I don’t know why they bothered.)  Watching the film the first time, I was just about falling out of my chair, looking to see if I would get a glimpse of the door to David’s apartment one more time.  I didn’t, but the hallway hadn’t changed at all, and I was glad of that (the current tenants may feel differently).

In the book, I also mention that the building was up the street from what was at the time a lesbian bar called Meow Mix.  Kevin Smith’s film Chasing Amy (one of Ben Affleck’s first) was shot there; my husband, Lorenzo, worked as the still photographer and I was an extra. In one scene you can see me and my best friend from childhood, Claudia Koeze, as part of an audience of women rapturously watching Joey Lauren Adams singing onstage (we must have been excellent actresses, as Ms. Adams was one of the rudest and most arrogant women I’ve ever come across in “real life”, and rapture–sapphic or not–was definitely not what I would have been feeling while watching her perform).  At the end of the film, in the scene at the comic-book convention, Lorenzo strides through in a momentary close-up.  It was strange to be involved in the surreal process of making a low-budget film, just doors down from the place where, a few short years earlier, I’d spent possibly the most surreal (yet very real) and intense eight months of my life.

The Lower East Side is a small world, cinematically speaking.

An afterthought: I don’t like to trash people, particularly people about whom I know next-to-nothing, so as far as Joey Lauren Adams is concerned I should say that at the time she was very young, and probably–as most people would be–a little carried away with herself and the idea that she was the star of a film, and maybe stressed out by the whole ridiculous process of making a movie.  She may otherwise be a very nice person, and may also have matured over the years (I was no doubt quite different at the time too).

The Point, Really…

A lot of reviews have been coming in for Holding Breath on Amazon and Goodreads.com.  I get as excited as a child every time I see that a new one has been posted, but the ones that make me the happiest are the ones (and there are quite a few) that say that the reader feels as if he or she has gotten to “know” David through reading the book, had begun to think of him as a friend, and even, in a couple of cases, had started to fall in love with him (yup–been there, done that ).  Writing the book, I’d been kind of worried that no one would be able to see the sweetness in him as I had, no matter what I wrote.  But people are seeing it, and reading about their reactions to my portrayal of him (I’m really not all that concerned about what people think of me–it’s David’s book) has made me cry more than once.  I’m so grateful.  And I know that it would make him happy (it would also no doubt make him laugh to see his face plastered all over the Internet, if he’d known at the time what the Internet would be).

I wanted to post another song from the book’s playlist to go with this post, and for some reason The National’s song “Bloodbuzz Ohio” seemed the most appropriate (although I couldn’t tell you why, exactly, except that something about it just reminds me so much of David).  It’s a great song, although I find the video a little baffling because it’s so different from the “video” that runs in my head when I hear the song.  Here it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K779pqvYQds